Data & Information management: are we helping the business?

The world of data management and its capabilities have grown almost exponentially over the last two decades.

With ever more innovative data & analytics solutions – often driven by machine learning and AI – the possibilities to process and obtain insights out of data have never been more present.

And while the amount of data solutions is growing at a speed that is impossible to contain – most business users tend to look at this with a sense of –

“… great the data team is able to use all these wonderful techniques, but I still don’t quite understand how they’re making my life easier…”.

As a data team have you ever wondered:

• What the percentage is of business users, using the components of your data platform to consume data (instead of obtaining them from a legacy source or file)?
• How many times business users approached your data team to help them with their business problems?
• How many business users have given up on Excel or MS-Access and use data tools to fulfill all their data preparation and reporting/visualization needs?
• How often you are in contact with the business users trying to understand their day-to-day needs and help them fix these through data?

And off course – there are organizations where business users were helped with data in a very concrete manner, but unfortunately most organizations have a hard time going beyond the data warehouse, a few services to customers, and a set of innovative use cases.

The idea behind the “data mesh” – a new way of approaching data and business needs – originates from the gap between data strategies of companies and the reality in the field.

Business users are still stuck with the problems they had before or are now confronted with new problems due to the availability of data.

Most organizations want to become data driven, obtain a data culture or be able to compete hard through data – yet we only see 27% obtaining a data culture and 38% that truly became data driven.

So, data mesh is the solution to go for right?  Yes, but there’s an important piece of the puzzle missing.

If your business users don’t understand what data and data management can do for them – or how the efforts and deliverables from the data team can help them – implementing a data mesh architecture will be a great initiative but will not reach its full potential.

It’s vital that business users understand how they can solve their business problems through data – creating a pull for solutions from the business users instead of the current push from the data team (towards the business).

That’s why we have put our proven data course in the market called “Solving business problems with data”.  This successful course – that has been key in changing the way business users see and collaborate with the data team – is now available as a classroom training as well.

Once users understand the possibilities of data and can map them to their business problems its important they can take the first steps with the data team and can explain their needs.

To do so successfully, proper data governance needs to be in place – and that’s why we’re offering this Data Governance Foundations course as a follow-up to the “Solving business problems with data”.

Want to turn your data team and its effort into a true and practical value driver for the business or are you a business professional who wants to know how data can benefit you? Don’t hesitate to subscribe to our courses at:

Data Governance Foundations – click here

Solving Business Problems with Data 101 – click here